Storm Fear

Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace

Storm Fear is the second film by Theodora Productions, an independent company formed by Cornel Wilde and his then wife Jean Wallace in 1954. Wallace was a troubled woman and Wilde was a freelance actor on the downslope after being cut loose by Columbia Pictures. Wilde hoped he could arrest the downturn of their careers in self-produced films. He also knew he had to change his image as he aged from romantic lover boy to a more grizzled, even villainous lead. Theodora's first feature, The Big Combo directed by Joseph H. Lewis, was a hit with audiences and critics and is now regarded, justly, as a noir classic. Unfortunately and primarily to save money, Wilde took up the directorial reins for Storm Fear. 

Now I'm not sure if Storm Fear would have been a good movie even if it had been directed by Lewis or Anthony Mann. The script by Horton Foote, based upon Clinton Seeley's novel, is a clunky rehash of The Petrified Forest with Freudian overtones. The setting is a farm in rural Idaho. A sickly and frustrated writer played by Dan Duryea named Fred Blake lives on the farm with his beautiful wife Elizabeth (Wallace) and twelve year old son, David. Most of the chores and the mentoring of the boy is left to hired hand Hank (Dennis Weaver) who pines for Elizabeth. Suddenly a car appears containing Frank's brother, Charlie (Wilde), a goon named Benjie (Steven Hill) and a chippie named Edna (Lee Grant). We soon surmise that they have fled the scene of a bank robbery which left two dead. Charlie is wounded and uses the farm as a hideout while an ominous blizzard rages on.

Tacked onto this standard hostage plot is the issue of David's parentage. Since the audience can surmise that he is the product of an affair between Charlie and Elizabeth by the end of the second reel, the tortured truth is bandied about for far too long. We repeatedly see a miscast Duryea with white spray paint in his hair bemoan his status hysterically in between beatings administered by the brutish Benjie. Jean Wallace, a far lesser performer than Duryea, fares better because her character is aligned with Wallace's recessive qualities. Elizabeth has been beaten down in life by bad men and fate. She sullenly goes about the cooking, washing, and cleaning with an aura of defeat and Wilde, at least, is director enough to give space to Wallace's silent reaction shots. However, Steven Hill's performance, which comes off as wacky instead of menacing, makes me wonder if Wilde was giving his actors enough rope to hang themselves. This is also true of Wilde's own overheated performance. Storm Fear is at its most ridiculous when Wilde pretends to writhe in pain, never, of course, crying out, while Wallace extracts a bullet from his leg. Wilde is stripped to the waist, as he is in about a third of this picture, and you can't help but think the real reason is because he was vain and wanted to show off his biceps. In an inordinate number of the pictures he directed, Wilde was compelled to show off his physique. Dennis Weaver, fortunately, is assuredly effective as the picture's deus ex machina and Lee Grant is terrific in a one dimensional role.

One of the things that holds the picture together is Joseph LaShelle's (Laura, 7 Women) crisp and coherent cinematography. Even when Foote's speechifying gets overblown and Wilde doesn't know where to put his camera, LaShelle's work helps the film resemble the grade A production that it most certainly wasn't. Wilde fares better as a director out of doors rather than in, but even outdoors he inserts close-ups of his actors in front of cheesy projected backdrops that jar with the exterior vistas. What Wilde does display in his neophyte effort and throughout his career as a director is a good sense of pacing. The picture moves along briskly even if it is from one idiotic conflict to another. There is no way that I consider Storm Fear a "good" picture, but Wilde's kooky conviction, what Andrew Sarris called "half-baked intensity", makes it somewhat entertaining.